Just about anything is more economically viable than classical music.
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Well, thatâs 5 dollar per 1k clicks. So even if you listen to 5 seconds that still counts. And remember an album has multiple tracks, so that adds up. Still, even big labels complaining that they cannot make money from streaming, if you follow related news.
I think it needs to be at least 30s to count, and, as I said above, I think the amount paid depends on how much of the track is streamed.
I canât get these numbers to add up at all though. If even da TURKISH DONGAH has >1M streams/month Spotify is way larger than I thought, and if a mere 5% of those earnings goes to actually buy the music they keep there they should have an enormous profit margin - as in 80-90%. There must be something we donât know.
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And, as a rate benchmark, my last 500 digital sales reports combined, pasted from my account records:
Qty. Total:921.0 Earned Total:$7.37030268
Thatâs what Iâve been paid, direct from Spotify.
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Extrapolating, thatâs $104k for him and his record company to share in. Good money actually.
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Well, actually Spotify has not make any profit yet. It is still losing money every year, and a lot ⊠This sounds rediculous, but as of 2017, only 5.5% of its users are premium users, which means, 95% of the people just listen to Spotify for free, without paying any money to the streaming serviceâŠ
Even VBM had about a million streams on Spotify.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BrM-Bt8HxXM/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=7wh6seokf7jg
At the same time, they canât keep insisting on CDs forever. For example, I wonât buy any more CDs; theyâre too cumbersome and I donât have the space.
I think thatâs why many small labels of historical reissues either closed or became dormant, as traditional CD sales drop, and new ways like digital streaming or download would not compensate for that loss.
Iâm surprised VBM gets nearly a million plays. I suppose a bunch of these recordings are mixed into playlists and get aired randomly.
For the year so far my YT channel has 2.8m views and 17.9m minutes watched. Itâs nearly all Russian material with very few legit copyright claims (the rest I remove, which YT probably wouldnât be happy about). Only in the past 6 months has one Russian company decided to upload their own material to earn money from it, blocking it on my end (old concert videos).
Yeah I dunno how she managed that, or the 355k fans. No disrespect to her, I like her playing, but she barely plays solo outside of Italy (and China). Her only Parisian recitals are CD launches, and this is the city she lives in! Having said that, somehow my Russian piano teacher recognised her name when I gave her my bootleg list the other day. That surprised me, because she didnât even know who Koroliov was!
Da Turkish dongah is somewhat more understandable, since he has the whole of Turkey supporting him. Even my Turkish friends would ask if I wanted to go see him with them, I declined.
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Well that VBM gets 1M clicks and Say 13M clicks speaks for that labels like APR would have no problem surviving whatsoever through Spotify. They have far larger names than that in their catalogue, and lots of them as opposed to just a single brand, and also not nearly the same expenses a larger/modern label would. I really think this is why theyâre releasing so much and at break neck speed - itâs about claiming as much material as possible for these streaming platforms. The more things you have tied to your label, the more clicks youâll get, and the more money youâll make - without doing anything over the next 50 or so years.
But thereâs still something fishy about the numbers since it just doesnât add up. My back of the hand calculation gives Spotify an incredible profit margin, and to hear theyâre in fact LOSING money makes things even more suspicious. I can accept that Iâm off with my assumptions on what the monthly fee is, their number of subscribers, average plays per days etc, but not by several orders of magnitude which would be required to make sense of this. Itâs probably that larger labels have been offered a better deal to put virtually their entire catalogue at Spotifyâs disposal.
Hereâs something which may be of interest:
If you get a track into an âofficialâ playlist, youâre gonna get significant stats just by default. One of my tracks got into a ânew releasesâ playlist (ironically itâs imo the least interesting track on its parent album!) and, despite me effectively being a complete nobody, itâs still had about 42k plays.
The question does of course arise: do labels facilitate playlisting of their tracks by paying Spotify for the privilege? I donât know, but it certainly wouldnât surprise me.
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I think you are way off. 100 streams per month is at the extreme low end. Even a very conservative estimate of ~8 tracks per day means around 250 streams per month, and it can be assumed that many users stream WAY more than that. Students only pay $5, families of up to 6 users pay $15 total, and free users likely earn them even less in ad revenue. This further erodes spotifyâs profit margin. Plus there are other costs that we donât specifically know, such as contract costs with major labels, costs related to streaming (CDN), staff costs, development and admin expenses, marketing costs, etc.
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So, very little of that actually goes to the artistâŠ
42k is pretty insane!
Yeah that might be a typical day for a typical user. But itâs the average we need. I think there are lots of people with an account who donât open spotify at all most days of the week, while there are probably also people who have it on all day to keep them going during work. But even I as a complete pianohead donât listen to music every day. I think 100 streams per month is completely sensible as an average over all their users, but even if we take your 250 thatâs just a 2.5 increase. Weâd need a 100 fold increase for the numbers to match. Salaries, marketing, server costs etc was all part of the estimate.
Tiz out!!
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